Waiting To Decay

[Sludge]

I dated Karma. Word of advise, never do that.

I dated Karma too! Think she gave me the Drippy Dick if I remember correctly....;)


Ahhh, Ecuador!

 

[Friday]

Ha! Kama Sutra of PTSD... How to avoid getting f*cked, in simple instruction. With pictures. :ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO:

:notworthy:

 

[Sludge]

Ha! Kama Sutra of PTSD... How to avoid getting f*cked, in simple instruction. With pictures. :ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO:

:notworthy:

Dunno. That picture of a barrel on the frontspiece made me nervous...

 

[Aprooster74]

I'm slowly coming to terms with the fact that I'll never be the person I was. Just gotta learn new ways to make life half way livable

I have to be me and 'disassemble' this little comment you made. Sorry :-)

STOP!!! Thinking you have to learn "NEW" ways to do things. This is one of the greatest horrors of us Combat Vets, because we believe that we have to learn to live in the world we ensured. The reality is that we have to learn how to adapt who we are to the new world we live in. I have stated on numerous occasions in numerous post that a soldier is any jo blow that signs the paper, however a Combat Vet is the one that reached the epitome of our purpose and was capable. In any war there are ga-zillions of soldiers and only a minimal number of Combat Vets.

The reality is this. Never forget your training. All those hours and days out in the middle of nowhere had a purpose and a meaning. I call civilians the 'enemy,' and for good reason. The training we received was non-specific because we never new who the enemy would be. So, we were trained to face any possibility. Now that you are home the enemy is being 'civilian.' How do we adapt to a world of selfish inconsiterate (sp) individuals who only care about themselves? Honest answer ??? We can't

A Combat Vet does what is necessary without question because they do not matter. Those whom we protect matter, whether we know them personally or not. Whether we are married with kids? Single and just have Dad and Mom? Siblings? etc. We faced the challenge and let the a**hole know that we would fight for home. This is what makes us different and unable to truly become a full blooded civilian.

"A Combat Vet thinks about others before they think about themselves"

The above sentence is what makes adaption difficult, and why I say that the new enemy is 'being civilian.'

My advice is simple: Never forget that you are a soldier and a soldier is adaptive. Take what you have been taught and adapt it to your new theater of operation :-)

Patrick

 

[OIF2Vet]

It's strange how easily we adapt to being over there and how hard it is to adapt back here. You're right though @Aprooster74 never really thought of it quite like that before.

 

[OldDoorGunner]

Patrick is 100% correct!!! You, me, Patrick and other combat vets can never ever be a civilian again.....You can try, but it will not work, will only make things worse. The harder you try the worse it gets....Once you have been it the shit of the dark side, you have become what you were trained for......A Combat Soldier........Be Proud of that Brother, I am !!!!

J R

 

[Lurch]

@OIF2Vet, you didn't adapt over there. You began the process the day that you entered the service. For many of us, it took months to years before we entered the combat zone. This meant we had time to adapt our skills to what we needed when we needed them. The problem is, we don't have boot camp for civilians to retrain us, and we don't have buddies that help us every day like we did in our units.

I'm even noticing a gap between two segments of AD. Its not between Officers and Enlisted, its between those that have seen/experience combat and those that have not. This gap seems to get wider every year and every time you come back from theater. There will be those to serve that will never deploy. They will become civilians the easiest. Everyone else will be somewhere on the spectrum. Combat vets will always be at the far end.

 

[Jimmy1]

I sort of agree to disagree Lurch.

You are right with regards to boot camp, they do program us for instinctive discipline, and do change us from being a civilian to a military person, but there is a definite line in the sand and most of us know where that stops. We can have our private life, and our military life, it's only after 20 years or so or a period of long service do we change, i.e. awaking at dawn, shaving daily, keeping our hair high and tight, etc. That on it's own is not really an issue.

Deploying overseas is different. We deploy often to very small team environments who we share everything with. We learn to rely on this group for everything, food, water, shelter, security, etc, and most important, our personal safety. Most veterans come home need time to adapt back to the 'Barracks' way of life.

When we experience a trauma or life threatening event, our body is shocked. Most people over time will adjust to this and the trauma becomes a bad experience or memory, this is usually helped by therapy or just talking about it. For civilians, well they can generally adjust quite easily, but for a veteran, the very next day there might be another such trauma or two, or more, and the next day more. Now if they are not helped, this can evolve. The magic number the psych manual (DSM V) gives is 30 days. If a persons symptoms last longer than that, it has generally developed into PTSD.

This is why life is so hard for the returning veteran. This has been seen throughout time. WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Korea, and modern conflict. Veterans are deployed for periods of up to 12 months and longer, the way of life has been ingrained and added to this multiple traumas. For some there is no going back.

Just my opinion and waffle.

 

[Lurch]

Jimmy, I agree with you. One of my main points is that we forget how long it has taken us to get to this point. It isn't overnight and reintegration into the next phase of our lives will not be overnight. I don't think that a reintegration training to become a civilian will work, but we need to remember that was the first step to us becoming military. We will never build the close teams that we had in combat. Those days are gone and that is hard for everyone that has experience combat.

For most it takes 3 to 18 months from the time they are a civilian to reaching their first unit. Workups are generally 6 months. So most will have a minimum of 9 months of military training prior to them walking onto a plane or boat to head into combat. All this time you are with a team that has experienced the same things (basic, and advanced training/workups) in the past and will experience similar items in the future.

Now imagine doing this if we acted like civilians do. No boot or any follow on training, just go to work for 8 hours and then home to a small apartment alone or to friends and family. Imagine how hard it would be to integrate into a unit without going through these things as an E-1 thru E-3. At that rank you live and breath the military, and that is for a reason...it works.

Now imagine if we took a bunch of vets directly out of the service and put them together. They all worked and lived together and over time (9 to 24 months) they were allowed more and more freedom to move out and find a new place to live or a new job. They still had common past experiences and they were all experiencing the same thing in the future. That bond and trust would be there. I think it would help many to go through this type of reintegration to become a civilian again. We are our best therapist, that is the reason this site works so well.

If I had the money, this is what I want to do. I would love to start or buy a company and enough land to build a company city. Hire vets right out of the service and pay them like the military does here (base pay, housing and other allowances). They have a house, the Exchange and medical all in a small area. They all have had the same or similar past experiences, and the bond and trust would be there to help each other. As with boot, some will wash out and some will move on making room for the next batch of recruits.

 

[OIF2Vet]

I only wish I felt that "bond" or "trust" with my platoon... Not sayin everyone I was with was bad, but there was only about 3 or 4 people I felt I could trust. Hell my damn platoon left me and my driver in a convoy.. I still don't remember how we found an FOB that night.. Some things I only have bits of the memories..

 

[Sludge]

Jimmy, I agree with you. One of my main points is that we forget how long it has taken us to get to this point. It isn't overnight and reintegration into the next phase of our lives will not be overnight. I don't think that a reintegration training to become a civilian will work, but we need to remember that was the first step to us becoming military. We will never build the close teams that we had in combat. Those days are gone and that is hard for everyone that has experience combat.

For most it takes 3 to 18 months from the time they are a civilian to reaching their first unit. Workups are generally 6 months. So most will have a minimum of 9 months of military training prior to them walking onto a plane or boat to head into combat. All this time you are with a team that has experienced the same things (basic, and advanced training/workups) in the past and will experience similar items in the future.

Now imagine doing this if we acted like civilians do. No boot or any follow on training, just go to work for 8 hours and then home to a small apartment alone or to friends and family. Imagine how hard it would be to integrate into a unit without going through these things as an E-1 thru E-3. At that rank you live and breath the military, and that is for a reason...it works.

Now imagine if we took a bunch of vets directly out of the service and put them together. They all worked and lived together and over time (9 to 24 months) they were allowed more and more freedom to move out and find a new place to live or a new job. They still had common past experiences and they were all experiencing the same thing in the future. That bond and trust would be there. I think it would help many to go through this type of reintegration to become a civilian again. We are our best therapist, that is the reason this site works so well.

If I had the money, this is what I want to do. I would love to start or buy a company and enough land to build a company city. Hire vets right out of the service and pay them like the military does here (base pay, housing and other allowances). They have a house, the Exchange and medical all in a small area. They all have had the same or similar past experiences, and the bond and trust would be there to help each other. As with boot, some will wash out and some will move on making room for the next batch of recruits.

Agreed. That is referred to as a corporate arcology. Many asian companies do the same type of thing, judt with eggheads rather than vets.

 

[Sludge]

I only wish I felt that "bond" or "trust" with my platoon... Not sayin everyone I was with was bad, but there was only about 3 or 4 people I felt I could trust. Hell my damn platoon left me and my driver in a convoy.. I still don't remember how we found an FOB that night.. Some things I only have bits of the memories..

Try it with a crew of 200+, the bulk of them too cowardly to even try to join a different branch first....
(Truth, I wanted to be a jarhead when I grew up.)